drpaul854

Anyone have an update on the Girl Friendly policy at Ibis in Pattaya?

Great List - Thanks But I have to agree with the poster below: I stayed in the Town Lodge last year - BIG walk (I also walk miles in BKK regularly) for a clean but mediocre room in need of an update. It does have an interesting bar/lounge

I'll add my quick positives about Cathay Pacific also - at least they are good from the States to BKK - and they run some killer deals from time to time, it is worth signing up for their email alerts.

Nice site but still the button problems outlined above from the Taxi page.

Emil - IMHO - has in correct here in my opinion on airfares, though recently EVA has been cutting back on the number of routes flown NY to BKK which has the effect of raising prices. Not sure about other airlines as EVA Deluxe seats are my travel of choice - at least so far. But BigDUSA has it right - IMHO -as far as skin color and any problems you might have. If they are sore the next day - they can't make any money.

FirstTimer, Your travel plans are not the ideal for a scuba trip but I'll bet the diving in Pattaya and Phuket in July is far more enjoyable than that available to you on a good day in England. I have never been to Pattaya or Phuket in July but I have been to both and dove in June (about the same rainfall as July) and in September (average rainfall greater than July). It rains half to 2/3 of the days but often later in the afternoon after the 2 tank dive is finished for the day. And often it only lasts for an hour or so and then it stops. Regarding Phuket - the liveaboards only run mid October to early May. Reason - they usually dive the Similian Islands which are a national park and are closed by law to allow the reefs to rest. Plus it would be no fun stuck out on a liveaboard during one of the somewhat frequent storms during June to Septmember. There are still outstanding daytrip dives with decent (not outstanding) vis even that time of year Check out this for weather info - http://www.travelfish.org/weather_fish.php Don't worry - go to LOS and you will enjoy, especially if it is your first trip - you will be in sensory overload and may not even notice the rain

I used Mr. Toom's excellent service from Bangkok to Pattaya on 11-2-07. This is my 6 or 7th experience and all have been great. Highly recommended.

What he said

I stayed there 6 months ago. The regular rooms are a bit small in my opinion, the next size up is quite large and spacious - but both are in need of refurbishing old carpet, paint, fixtures, bedspread,etc.. Location is great staff accomodating if not overly welcoming and guest friendly - IDs taken at desk and phone call made to you before the ID is returned.

18 months ago I had my teeth laser whitened for 8000 B (?) at a dentist on Second Road - forget the name but half way between Soi 13 and Pattaya South. Excellent job but be warned: 1. You are limited in the types of food you can eat for several days - the laser treatment (most types of whitening treatment) remove the "protective layer" on the teeth and the tooth is much more porous and easily stained at this time. These pores fill in naturally over several days. This dentist recommended a week - I have heard others say 3-4 days is long enough. Basically stay away from most dark foods - especially sauces and wine. 2. Some people can have painful teeth for 1-3 days or more. For me I could not suck wind through my teeth for two days and for the first 24 hours was subject to periodic jolts of pain that lasted less than a second. My buddy who had the same procedure at the same place had no pain. Has to do with (believe it or not) you teeth becoming dehydrated during the 1-1/2 hour long process. Teeth look great afterward - very Hollywood.

Soi 4: Bella Vista Prima has a modest gym - see website for info: www.bellavillapattaya.com

BJ Holiday (mentioned above) has "large shower" because it is basically the entire bathroom - no seperate shower stall just the shower head in a corner of the tiled bathroom. Soi 13 Whitehouse Condotel has large (3+ people) very nice 3-sided corner glass enclosed showers complete with a small seat and lots of elbow room. Guest friendly - but no pool if that is important to you.

I have used Mr. Toom on 5 occasions including 2 pickups at 3:00AM he and his drivers have never let me down. He does drive but also subcontracts to other drivers depending on the work load - the driver's english skills have varied from excellent to basic the cars from good to great. Will continue to use his service - use to be 1200 Baht old airport to Pattaya not sure if there is any change with the new airport.

It is expensive and you never really know who will show up and escort you to Pattaya - I'd personally save the money and go with a prearranged car service - I like Mr. Toom's service you can find him on this forum by doing a quick search. Not sure of the new price now that the airport has changed but it should be 1200 Baht or under including all tolls

I am copying this from another forum by a member who is also a member here and who I believe is currently out of Thailand traveling in Cambodia - it may help you - most of it is beyond my lievel of expertise to comment on it: Hey I know alot of people are worried about thier online security while in South East Asia. With keyloggers at internet cafes and the paranoia that comes along with traveling around the world with a laptop it's a bit nerveracking at times. So, I decided to figure out a safe secure way for me and you to use Internet cafes all over the world and still have the basic avalabilty of most of our laptop applications. I am sharing it with the board so people can worry about others things.. like the ladies. First off you need to buy a USB Drive. I bought a 2 GB Corsair which can be found here if you are in the States. If not you can look around for something similar. I use Corsair because they make excellent memory and thier prices are very resonable for USB drives. Ok, so you get your new USB drive home. What to do next. Well before you load your new shiny programs onto the drive you need to make some decisions. * The first decision is what file system to use. FAT, FAT 32 or NTFS. * 2nd question.. What type of computers will you be plugging your USB drive into. So as not to get too complicated I'll break it down like this. Basically: • Fat16 is fine for every computer, but it uses more space on disk. • Fat32 is good to use as long as I'm only using windows 98 and up • NTFS is probably the best as long as I'm using windows 2000/XP up **Note** If you are going to plug your USB drive into a mac you CANNOT use NTFS. **Note** ..ok So I've decided to use NTFS as my file system. Why ? NTFS performs better, for one thing. USB drives are normally formated as a FAT drive and are rather slow. Plus, if the drive is ever pulled in the middle of a write (or a power failure occurs), you won't hose your drive. Thanks to the NTFS log, a file operation is either completed or it doesn't happen at all. FAT32 doesn't offer this protection. I like this protection. So that decision made I .. plug in my USB and click on start in the bottom right hand of the computer and goto RUN Type this into the box: convert X: /FS:NTFS /NoSecurity (where X is the drive letter of your USB key). It'll convert any FAT/FAT32 drive to NTFS. The NoSecurity switch grants all users write access to the drive, so you won't run into trouble on Limited/Guest-level accounts. That will happen in alot of Internet Cafes. _______________________________________________________________________ Ok you are all set to get your first program. Go here and download Firefox Portable. Read the page and install it. (If you have Firefox on your computer your local Firefox profile is usually installed in C:\Documents and Settings\[user]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\default.???\ Just copy all of those files except the cache directories to the profile directory within Firefox Portable on your USB drive. When you start Firefox Portable for the first time, be sure to turn off disk cache, password saving and history. You can set all of these within the Privacy tab of the Firefox Options window. Sometimes, certain profiles will cause the launcher to fail or hang. This is usually due to an incompatible extension.) If this happens, delete the directory, install again and download your extensions one by one. Once you have set up Firefox you can go on to the next step. Next thing to do is surf to here and buy this program. Roboform Portable Basically it does three things: 1) It stores all you passwords to every internet site on your USB drive. 2) It encrypts every password with AES encryption - the strongest encryption available. No one is gonna crack your passwords. 3) This is important to us. It defeats Keyloggers. When RoboForm enters the saved password into form fields, it is not typing them through the keyboard, so if a keylogger is installed on a computer and it is monitoring keyboard events for passwords, it will get no keyboard clicks when you use RoboForm to enter passwords. So you can safely log onto your bank accounts etc. no problem. Sweet eh ? Once you finish this step, onto some more stuff. The rest is easy. _______________________________________________________________________ Ok, so here is a list of the other programs you want on you USB key and thier website addresses. They are all FREEWARE and have been tested by me and many others for thier portabilty. * 1) Pstart - PStart is an application menu that allows you to easily launch your portable apps. When run, it sits in your system tray and brings up an icon menu of the apps you have on your portable device. *Must Have* * 2) Portable Thunderbird - Mozilla Thunderbird - Portable Edition is the popular Mozilla Thunderbird email client packaged as a portable app, so you can take your email, address book and account settings with you. You can also get it with GPG and Enigmail preconfigured to encrypt and sign your email. You can even get your Gmail on here and no one can look at it. Here is a guide to get Gmail on there. * 3) Portable OpenOffice.org - The complete office suite that's completely portable. * 4) McAfee AVERT Stinger- Stinger is a stand-alone utility used to detect and remove specific viruses. It is not a substitute for full anti-virus protection, but rather a tool to assist administrators and users when dealing with an infected system. Stinger utilizes next generation scan engine technology, including process scanning, digitally signed DAT files, and scan performance optimizations. * 5) Converber- Converber is a unit converter. It is a powerful software utility that will help make easy conversions between 924 various units of measure in 31 categories. * 6) Scan2PDF- A utility for bulk scanning, converting the scanned pages to PDF and burning them on CD/DVD for archiving. * 7) Portable Gimp - Photoshop on your USB drive. Sweet ! * 8) Portable VLC Media Player -play your media anywhere. You can take your audio and video files along with everything you need to play them on the go. * 9) WinDV Portable - is a small and easy to use Windows application for capturing videos from DV device (camcorder) into AVI-files and for recording AVI-files into DV device via FireWire (IEEE 1394) interface. * 10) Ifranview - IrfanView is a very fast, small, compact and innovative FREEWARE (for non-commercial use) graphic viewer for Windows * 11) The Sage - TheSage is a complete dictionary and a multifaceted thesaurus of the English language. It runs locally, and does not use your Internet connection. * 12) Faststone Capture - FastStone Capture is a powerful, flexible and intuitive screen-capture utility. It allows you to capture anything on the screen * 13) Cybershredder - CyberShredder is a quick, safe and handy utility that lets you erase confidential files from your computer permanently. * 14) Faststone Photo Resizer - FastStone Photo Resizer is an image converter / resizer intended to enable users to convert, rename, resize, crop, rotate, change color depth, add text and watermarks to images in a quick and easy batch mode. * 15) Portable Gaim - Portable Gaim is a multi-protocol instant messaging client that works with AOL Instant Messenger, ICQ, MSN Messenger, Yahoo! and more. You can log into multiple networks all with the same program. All your IM settings and buddy lists are self-contained, so it leaves no personal information behind on the machine you run it on. * 16) Portable Firezilla - Portable FileZilla is the popular FileZilla FTP client packaged as a portable app, so you can take your server list and settings with you. * 17) Foxit PDF Reader - Foxit Reader is a free reader for PDF (Portable Document Format) documents. You can view and print PDF documents with it. * 18) Virtual Notes - Sticky Notes... Roboform has one inside which encrypts your notes. * 19) IE Privacy Keeper Portable - Whether you are using Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox, IE Privacy Keeper automatically cleans up the browser history once you are done surfing the net. It also shreds the files. * 20) Remora USb Guard - Remora USB File Guard is designed to do file encryption and compression in your USB storage devices. With Remora USB File Guard, you can secure all your files and store them in USB disk anytime and anywhere. (Axcrypt is my favorite but it's not portable) * 21) Xemico Address Book - XemiCo Address Book is a contact manager for everyday use. The program is as simple and straightforward as one can be. and last but not least * 22) Portable ClamWin - Portable ClamWin is the popular ClamWin antivirus packaged as a portable app, so you can take your antivirus with you to scan files on the go. * 23 ) Board Member Scruff suggested Advanced Diary which is a free private digital diary for your daily records/trip reports. It's a very nice/functional program. _______________________________________________________________________ Next you will want to organize your USB drive so it's not cluttered. Make folders for Utilities, Anti Virus Etc. and drag all the installed apps into the various folders. All the apps are stand alone so don't worry about moving them around to organize. After that open PStart and drag and drop all your programs into it. Leave PStart.exe in the root folder of your USB drive. Defrag the drive... Go and download the freeware program Allway Sync Install it to your home computer/laptop. Make a USB backup directory on your hardrive somewhere. Run Allway Sync and sync the drive. Run it whenever your change files on your USB drive. That's it. I am sure that there are other apps. Feel free to add yours and/or correct me on anything I might have missed or gotten wrong. Rename the USB Drive. You will be very safe using this USB drive on the most infested keylogging thieving Internet Shops on the planet... and it all fits in your pocket. Sweet huh ? If you lose your USB drive or it's stolen. No problem. Just go home, buy a new drive and sync from your Briefcase you made. It'll take 2 minutes. Then goto all the websites and change you passwords if you are paranoid. It'll take them a Kray super computer and a lifetime to crack your passwords anyway..so you've got a few days at least to change your passwords and every website is already in you Briefcase. --***** All these programs come to 352mb On a NTFS formated drive. About 550mb on a FAT drive EDIT:Aug 11. Added Advanced Diary, suggested by board member Scruff